“Making the Digital Humanities More Open”: Modeling Digital Humanities for a Wider Audience

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

Abstract

“Making the Digital Humanities More Open,” a NEH ODH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant Project, is creating a free and easy-to-use tool that enables end-users with a variety of disabilities and abilities to access online humanities resources, allowing digital humanities projects to share the products of their text-based projects with this often-neglected audience of readers. During the year previous to DH 2013, our team designed and deployed a WordPress-based accessibility tool that created braille content for end-users who are blind or low vision. Specifically, we extended the use of Anthologize — a free and open source plug-in for WordPress that currently translates any RSS text into PDF, ePub, HTML, or TEI — to include the conversion of text to braille. As a result, we not only made it easy for digital research content creators to convert a text into braille, thereby extending humanities content to hundreds of thousands of visually disabled readers, but we also experimented with making braille available visually through the WordPress interface. This tool will also make it possible to translate the textual content of an Omeka archive into braille provided the site — like most that use Omeka — publishes an RSS feed. We conducted initial tests of the tool by translating the existing BrailleSC oral histories into braille, and then reached out to other Omeka- and WordPress-based humanities computing projects to ask for their cooperation and collaboration in translating their content.

Cory-Bohon on Journal of Digital Humanities

“Making the Digital Humanities More Open”: Modeling Digital Humanities for a Wider Audience

Poster

Abstract